154 Best Releases From the Genre Documentary (Page 2)

Alice Winocour’s Revoir Paris begins in a café. Mia (Virginie Efira), avoiding the rain, sits and drinks a glass of wine by herself, surrounded by other patrons. A birthday party for a middle-aged man, a few tourists, a couple having an argument, all of the classic situations are present. After spilling ink onto her hand, she heads to the bathroom, cleans up, grabs her belongings, and gets up to leave, when the two people in front of her are shot and killed. Continue Reading →

Thanks to decades of cameos in movies and promotional stunts intertwining him with the very word “Marvel,” audiences across the planet have a deep connection to comic book legend Stan Lee. Though he passed away in the final weeks of 2018, Lee’s legacy lives on. Marvel Studios even utilized existing audio of his voice in a special 2021 video. It helped them announce the return of its features to movie theaters. Artistic individuals like this tend to endure, no matter what happens to their physical bodies.  Continue Reading →

Frank Marshall's documentary on the legendary newsman too often goes softer than the anchorman ever would. This review is part of our coverage of the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival. Since its inception, the Tribeca Film Festival has always served almost as much of a celebration of celebrity as it is a celebration of cinema. That is especially true in regards to the documentary programming, which has always favored films about the life and work of famous people. That’s especially the case when there’s a chance a high-profile red-carpet premiere might lure such names into showing up. For instance, among the titles in this year’s lineup is Rather, Frank Marshall’s look at the legendary and controversial newsman Dan Rather.  Continue Reading →

With a travel book in her hands and a cigarette in her fingers, Carmen (Aline Küppenheim) deliberates what shade of paint she’d like for her walls. She wants it like a sunset but not too pink. Maybe a bit blue. After all, it’s not like she goes outside too often. Even her commutes, now to her Las Cruces beach house, are isolated. It’s 1976 in Chile, three years into dictator Augusto Pinochet’s rule. While paint drips onto Carmen’s heels, defectors and accused communists fall in the streets. But hey, she’s got a home to renovate.  Continue Reading →

The man behind the podcast An Invitation discusses how his appreciation of the director fueled his intensive dive into her films. Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation is a slow-burn horror about the dinner party from hell, one we should all be grateful not to attend, but podcaster Jim Penola thought otherwise. Instead, he invites listeners to sit down and stay awhile with An Invitation to the Invitation, a 15-part series that breaks down the 2015 film scene by scene. It’s full of thoughtful audio essays and radio-play style re-enactments set to an original score from his brother and composer John Penola.  Taking hundreds of hours to write and produce, it’s unlike almost any other film podcast streaming today, pushing the genre into refreshing new waters. The second season of An Invitation launched in December 2022 and explores Kusama’s most recent work, 2018’s Destroyer.  Continue Reading →

Fatal Attraction is an interesting study of how a controversial movie’s takeaway message can completely change, largely because audiences have changed. It’s a stylish, well-crafted film that spawned dozens of lesser imitations, and comes off as totally different when viewed from a 21st-century perspective. The carefully delineated roles of “hero” and “villain” are something murkier: we now understand that protagonist Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) isn’t entirely clear with Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) that their torrid fling is just that, a no-strings-attached encounter that means nothing to him. We see that Alex is done dirty with a script that depicts her as a one-note monster who must be defeated in the name of preserving the nuclear family. When even the YouTube commentariat largely agrees that Dan leads Alex on, you know the tide of public opinion has turned. Continue Reading →

I think Blubber was my favorite Judy Blume book growing up, because it acknowledged the casual cruelty of adolescent girls. Or maybe it was Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, because it’s where I learned about slam books, and its titular character (like me) masked her insecurities with wisecracks. No, scratch that, it was Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, with a protagonist who (also like me) used her colorful imagination as an escape from a chaotic home life. Continue Reading →

The acclaimed documentarian joins The Spool to discuss Brooke Shields, her work, her life, and her relationship to "Brooke Shields" the image. In 1981, Roger Ebert wrote a profile on Brooke Shields in which he—quoting a press agent—said, “She will be with us for the rest of our lives.” That turned out to be remarkably prescient, but neither the agent nor Ebert could have anticipated the myriad number of ways Shields has been with us in that time. Yes, she is extraordinarily beautiful. But many equally attractive people have come and gone, while Shields remains a consistent part of pop culture’s firmament. From her early appearances in films like Pretty Baby (1978), The Blue Lagoon (1980), and Endless Love (1981) and her controversial TV ads for Calvin Klein jeans, all of which focused on her sexuality while she was literally a child, to her shift in the later Eighties to become America’s Virgin to her reinvention as a comedic actress in the Nineties to becoming an advocate for those suffering from postpartum depression (and suffering the slings and arrows of Tom Cruise in full asshole mode as a result), Shields has been a persistently relevant figure in the American popular consciousness.  While Shields has lived much of her life in the public eye, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, a fascinating two-part documentary from Lana Wilson now streaming on Hulu, proves that she still has a great deal to say. Given access to nearly a half-century’s worth of archival material, which she presents alongside contemporary interviews with Shields, Wilson paints a fascinating, eye-opening portrait that demands a new consideration of Shields and her career. Much of her story is harrowing, be it specific to her life—her wrenching descriptions of sexual assault and her tumultuous relationship with her mother—or experiences too many young women in the spotlight share. (If you think having someone inquire about the state of your virginity sounds awful, imagine having talk show hosts do so on live television.) And yet, not only has Shields survived, she is thriving. She has found peace with herself and is able to look back on her life with a sense of control over it.  Continue Reading →

I remember parking my 7-year-old hinder in front of the television set on the evening of Nov 17, 1978 to bear witness to something that would presumably be unforgettable—a two-hour holiday special that set in the world of Star Wars, then pretty much the hottest thing in the universe. Like so many other people at the time, when it was all over, I was baffled by what I had just witnessed. Continue Reading →

This year's documentary category covered everything from Ukraine to freedom of the press to the dwindling fishing industry. The next few years will undoubtedly see a number of films addressing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but few will have the same impact as Mstyslav Chernov’s wrenching documentary 20 Days in Mariupol. Chernov is a Ukrainian war correspondent and photojournalist who happened to be in the border city of Mariupol with colleagues Evgeniy Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko when the first Russian tanks rolled in. Instead of fleeing, they elected to stay and chronicle exactly what was happening to the city  and its remaining citizens. Many of the brief snippets of the chaos and horror that happened over the course of the first three weeks of the invasion seen on news programs around the world came from their cameras. Here, Chernov presents an extended chronicle of those first 20 days, giving a fuller picture of what it was like to be on those streets at that time. He sets out to provide definitive proof that Russia, despite the denials of Vladimir Putin and the Russian media, has been committing war crimes by targeting civilian homes and non-military buildings for their attacks. The results are undeniably harrowing, including an eye-opening look at the grisly results of an attack on a hospital. Continue Reading →

The documentary Kim's Video stumbles when it stops relying on the facts in favor of flights of fancy. The video rental empire known as Kim’s Video began in the late 1980s. It started as an adjunct to a Manhattan dry-cleaning establishment owned by a mysterious man named Yongman Kim and eventually expanded to five New York City locations. Though it never went further than that geographically, it became a mecca for cinephiles worldwide. They were drawn in by tales of its legendary collection of classics, cult favorites, rare and quasi-legally obtained titles, and straight-up weird shit.  Nonetheless, its reputation couldn’t keep it from being a victim of the industry moving from physical media to streaming. The last store closed in 2008, leaving Kim sitting on a stockpile of over 55,000 titles that many institutions would give their eyeteeth to acquire.   Continue Reading →

The working relationship between author Robert Caro and editor Robert Gottlieb, now over a half-century-long, has delivered five completed books with a sixth on the way. Judged by the numbers alone, that may not seem like an especially impressive output. However, the extraordinary amount of acclaim and influence these works have garnered tell a different story. One could convincingly mount a case for the two having the most significant author-editor relationship of our time. Perhaps even one to rival such legendary collaborators as Thomas Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins or T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Continue Reading →

In Season 2, Hunters remains dedicated to exploring whether vengeance and justice can ever be one and the same. Continue Reading →

Gordon Bennett just wanted to have some stability for the future. So after selling his chain of grocery stores in the 1990s, Bennett turned to the stock market. Looking around for the right people to work with, he chose Bernie Madoff. Over a decade later, Bennett would become one of the countless lives rocked by the reveal that Madoff had been orchestrating the biggest Ponzi scheme America has ever seen. The emotional trauma experienced by Bennett and other victims of Madoff’s wickedness deserved a more consistently engaging docuseries than Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street.  Continue Reading →

"Avatar has no cultural relevance." "It's just Dances With Wolves with blue cat people." We've all heard the digs ever since James Cameron's 2009 opus hit theaters more than a dozen years ago, made all the money, and gobsmacked the Academy into giving it a Best Picture nomination. But even though it didn't immediately launch a franchise and give people (apart from a select few who took Pandora way too seriously) Avatar Fever, its impact was more subtle and quiet. Sure, it launched a mini-3D boom that leaked out into the early 2010s, but its most noticeable ripples came in its normalizing of a new suite of CG technology, radical motion capture and worldbuilding, and fully-formed digital environments that could genuinely transport viewers to another place. Continue Reading →

To The End opens with activist Varshini Prakash, leader of The Sunrise Movement, as she tours the destruction left in a wildfire’s wake. A bleak landscape meets her. There are houses burned and left in ruin. A car drives into the area, flames licking at the road as smoke covers the terrain. It’s a hell of a stirring beginning to Rachel Lears’ timely and extensive climate change documentary To The End.    Continue Reading →

“The Big Aristotle.” “The Diesel.” “Shaq Daddy.” Shaquille O’Neal goes by many names, but above all these, he’s simply “Shaq.” Making Shaq a household name wasn’t a given at first. Of course, being 7’1” helps. That alone doesn’t make becoming a giant among the biggest names in basketball an easy task though. Shaq covers the career of the mammoth basketball legend in a four-part documentary, complete with in-depth coverage of the man’s personal and professional life, while handled with an up-close, in-your-face approach. That’s the Shaquille O’Neal way.  Continue Reading →

The past couple of years have seen the arrival of a large number of documentaries dealing in some way with the COVID pandemic, as well as no small amount of films chronicling the Trump presidency and the increased prevalence of the MAGA mindset. David Siev’s debut film, Bad Axe (the winner of the Documentary Feature Audience Award at this year’s SXSW Film Festival), combines the two approaches. While that combination alone might keep some people from watching it due to an inevitable sense of burnout regarding both topics, it should be known that those who are willing to pass on it on those grounds alone will be missing out on one of the best, most engaging documentaries to emerge this year.  Continue Reading →

Most people won’t recognize George Anthony Morton’s name. The subject of Rosa Ruth Boesten’s new documentary, Master of Light, will be an unfamiliar face for many. Importantly, most people haven’t seen his work. They haven’t seen him hold a brush. They haven’t seen him examine the light. They haven’t seen his paintings, which are, in every sense of the word, magnificent. Continue Reading →

If Keith Raniere and the story of NXIVM didn’t creep you out enough, consider our picks for some of the past decade's best documentaries about cults The Vow Part II, premiering on HBO Max this week, still doesn’t make it any easier to believe that a professional bullshit artist like Keith Raniere, based on such outrageous lies as claiming he had the second highest IQ in the world, was able to create his own "executive success" cult, with an all-female inner circle who committed sexual assault and branding rituals to prove their devotion to him. Nothing about a cult seems believable from the outside, which is perhaps what makes documentaries about cults both so intriguing and chilling to watch – how can something so bizarre make perfect sense to some people?  With that, here’s some suggestions for additional documentaries based on real life cults, covering both the infamous and the lesser known: Continue Reading →

Sidney Poitier lived an incredible life. He was undeniable in every sense of the word. Even a quick glance at his biography reveals the depths of his star power, his acting prowess in films throughout the 1960s and 1970s (A Raisin in the Sun, In the Heat of the Night, etc.), and his impact, with an Oscar, a Grammy, a BAFTA, and knighthood to his name. Sidney, a new documentary from Reginald Hudlin, is a down-the-middle biography of the late actor. Poitier’s gravity makes it watchable, but its filmmaking leaves much to be desired.  Continue Reading →